Leadership Quote by Ernest Istook

Calling Iraq’s post-invasion political experiment a “birth” is doing strategic work. Birth language implies inevitability, innocence, and a natural process: something organic, messy but ultimately life-affirming. It also quietly edits out the fact that this “birth” arrived via war, occupation, and coercive state-building. Ernest Istook isn’t just praising an outcome; he’s laundering a cause. The phrase “one of the great positive changes of our era” tries to scale the story up beyond partisan dispute into epochal history, the kind that’s supposed to settle arguments by sheer moral altitude.

The intent is reassurance and vindication, aimed at audiences exhausted by images of insurgency, civilian casualties, and institutional collapse. By framing democracy as the era’s defining “positive change,” Istook offers a retroactive justification for U.S. policy: if a democratic Iraq emerges, then the costs become framed as the price of progress rather than a political choice with consequences. The subtext is also competitive: it positions America as midwife to modernity, a self-flattering narrative that turns geopolitics into a morality play.

Context matters: this line lands in the long shadow of the Bush-era freedom agenda, when “democracy” was treated as both a moral imperative and a security strategy. The rhetoric is confident because it needs to be. “Birth” signals beginnings, not results, which is the rhetorical escape hatch: even if the infant is fragile, the speaker can still claim the moment as historic.